In case you were wondering, some of the parts to make my groovy Rough Riders were sculpted by Rob at Curious Constructs.

Wednesday, 26 November 2014

The Fall Of Praetoria: by Warhammer 40K Campaigns

Attention citizen soldiers of glorious Praetoria.

Praetoria stands at Her hour of need.

The call has gone out across the galaxy, to our regiments,
our neighbours, our allies and the mighty warriors of the Holy Emperor. Our
appeals will not go unheard.

Now we must ready ourselves for the ultimate fight . Lest
Praetoria be lost… Praetoria fall… Praetoria be no more.

Now that I have set the mood... whilst r

andomly surfing the net I came across some brilliant new
Praetorian art work. At first I thought it was fan work posted on deviant art.
As I found more I thought it must be from Fantasy Flight games, meaning
Praetorians would appear in their RPG – an awesome prospect. Then I found the
source site and I read the words ‘The Fall Of Praetoria’.

Warhammer 40K Campaigns is (as the name suggests) a campaign
site that is still in development awaiting launch. It is being created by 40k fans
for 40k fans. The ‘studio team’ is based in France but will have all content also available in
English. Here is their own description of the site taken from their facebook
page:

“Warhammer 40K Campaigns will include new campaigns for
Warhammer 40.000 universe. Website will propose to players a complete history,
a forum, items to be unlock, unique illustrations and more...

Website will be in English and French.

This fantastic collaboration will allow to the website to
coming in 2014. All Facebook followers will have an exclusive access to beta
test.

Obviously some help with English translation is needed but I
was very excited by what I saw.

I was still full of questions about this project so I wrote
to the studio to find out more. I was mostly interested in ‘how’ and ‘who’
rather than the exact details of the site and campaigns – fan made materials are some of the best but sometimes it gets squashed before it gets going.

Here is my short Q&A with Guerin Anselme the project
manager (he apologised for his French-English translation).

Q) What is the studio behind Warhammer 40K Campaigns? This
has been listed as a ‘fan based project’ so who are you guys?

A) The studio is a band of friends, 1 webdesigner, 1
encoder, 1 project manager and freelance graphic designers, others are
volunteers, family member ... Only a fan project with friends in the trade and
budget.

Q) From what we have seen of the project there is clearly a
lot of work going into it. Are people donating their time or is it being
financed some way?

A) It comes to
personal time to the whole project except the illustrations and proofreading
English translations so that these are not a mixture of French / English.
Project cost 7000 to 10000€ funded by the project manager.

Q) Game workshop are notorious for crushing fans and their
projects, are you worried about IP infringements?

A) I have an
authorization email from GW, all texts
are created by us and illustration are also our property, it is not forbidden
to use the universe of Warhammer 40k. We rely on fans to help support us with
donations after opening site for it grows, the project manager is an ambulance
driver he can invest more in the project.

Q) Many veteran gamers love Praetorians what made you choose
them as the focus of the first Campaign?

A) Because I’m a
veteran gamer (20 years in hobby) and I really love Praetorian, so "Fall
of Praetoria" is born.

Q) Is there anything that fans can do to contribute to this
project?

A) Yes sure, when website will opening, we hope to have
financial support (even $ 1 per person) for the server and of course create
other campaigns. But we will need forum moderator (French and English), people
who creating blog posts, painting tutorials, any help is welcome as simply
ideas to improve the site.

We went on to discuss people’s Praetorian projects and
background articles. Guerin added “Of
course we are looking for all the [praetorian] background including those of
the fans and our main goal is to be closer to the fans even if we cannot
satisfy everyone.”

Here are a few previews (sorry for the small size).

Due to primarily being a volunteer project it has had some
delays and so will not be ready to launch in 2014 as planned. However, Guerin did
say that we can expect to see an update on the home page soon and it will be launched in 2015 so watch this
space!

To follow the updates on this project check out their facebook page here. I, for one, am very excited about all that has been planned. I fondly remember past 40k worldwide campaigns and I'll be keeping a very keen eye on how this develops.

On that note I'm off to finish what I have on my model desk so I can paint up some more Praetorians!

8 comments:

Ooooh. Some thought needs to be given to the numbers in the fluff. If a hive has a population in the 10s of Billions, an Iggy regiment could be as many as 10 thousand and Preatoria is one of the Imperium's 'regiment factories' then the numbers just don't stack up.

Anyone invading a hive world is likely to face the ten or so regiments being raised at the time, the off world IG Garrison regiment and possibly an organised civil defence militia, as well as the frateris militia and assorted hive world gangs.

On a world that produces Regiments for the IG (Preatoria, Palladia, Kreig, Vostroya et al) it could easily be twenty regiments at all stages between raw recruit and ready to deploy off world.

Many Praetorian regiment were requisitioned throughout the galaxy.Orks are a dangerous enemy that reproduce quickly. So I think a Waaagh is quite capable of invading a hive world although Defence effective are high.

However, we are ready to evolve the background if you suggest us something

Yes all invasion will be detailed, it's a massive waaagh who regroup 3 big boss greedy for power but time allies against the imperium.

We try everything to be coherent and of course in connection with GW background.

Imperium will be really defender, only ork can attack a zone, but if ork lose battle,Imperium leads a counter attack in territory where orks comming. So there will be no imbalance, to choose the attacker and no player will be penalized at attack or defend.Orks can't progress below 51% control of warzone to prevent a rush to the capital.

Brainstorming have running lot of times, and if absurd things is obvious there will be updates with help of communauty.

French is difficult you can speed in english i thinks it's better for my understanding ;).

I hope that answers your expectations, but to give you mouthwatering, website will have 21 pages of background.